Bot or not?

Russian of a mysterious nature chimes in on Courier website

Photos

Hmmm, isn't the first rule of being a Russian bot not giving your name in Cyrillic?

BY ERIKA NORTON

PIKE COUNTY — The Justice Department recently indicted 13 Russians and three Russian companies for allegedly infiltrating American social media channels and online comment sections with the goal of sowing discord in the U.S. So The Pike County Courier looked into whether any Russians had visited the Courier website and found eight visitors from Russia, three of which were from Moscow, over the week of Feb. 16-22.

The Courier used Ultra Tools, which can look up a user's unique string of numbers identifying a connected computer, also known as their IP address. According to Ultra Tools, Vladimir Bychkov has an IP address in Moscow.

Other postsFurther research shows that a poster with the same name and accompanying profile photo posted identical comments — each with the same typo and same seven exclamation points at the end — on several other media sites.

On Feb. 22, Bychkov posted the identical comment on stories published by the Philly Voice and the religion media site Patheos, and on two stories from WNEP. Each of the stories was about the same topic, a controversial festival planned by the The World Peace and Unification Sanctuary Church in Newfoundland, Pa.

In the Justice Department indictment, officials describe an elaborate operation of multiple Russian entities allegedly using both bots, autonomous programs that can interact with computer systems or users, and trolls, real-life people who make deliberately provocative posts online. The indictment also alleges that in order to hide the Russian origin of their activities, the defendants purchased space on U.S. computer servers to set up a virtual private network and make posts appear to be from Americans.

It is unclear whether Bychkov has any connection to the Russian entities mentioned in the Justice Department indictment. It is also unclear whether Bychkov is a bot, a troll, or neither.

Overall visitors Over the last year, there were 451 visitors from Russia to the Courier website, the eighth most popular country of visitors to the site. Ninety-four percent of the viewers were from the U.S., with 228,174 users.

The next was Canada with 2,508 visitors, then the United Kingdom with 1,873 visitors and India with 1,024 visitors.

The next most popular countries were Australia, Philippines, Germany, and then Russia.